17 Scenes on a Pull-out Couch
Feb. 19th, 2024 12:00 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
jupiter2932Title: 17 Scenes on a Pull-out Couch
Fandom: Torchwood
Characters: Ianto, Rhiannon, Owen, Johnny, Mica, David, Jack
Rating: T
Word Count: 5883
Notes: Written for Febuwhump 2024, Day 13, "You weren't supposed to get hurt."; this part does not contain any graphic scenes, but deals with ongoing aftermath/recovery from sexual assault
Directly follows after the bubble; series starts with our share of night and continues in here a mist, and there a mist.
Summary: Ianto spends the better part of thirty hours on his sister's couch and tries to work out what he needs.
I.
It's Ianto's day off when he wakes up at Rhiannon's.
Days off with Torchwood Three are, for most staff, scarcer than they would have been at One, with two of them rarely occurring in a row. Not so much for Ianto, who'd work month-long jags in a go without a break at One, sometimes, then have four or five days off when things were quiet; but that was less because of where he worked than who, exactly, he worked for directly. Yvonne Hartman didn't have much time for staff who didn't spend as much time on the job as she, but she quite liked Ianto.
Now, at Three, Jack's started interfering with the schedule to make Ianto take time off when Ianto doesn't put it in himself, ever since that one time he got a little lightheaded during a weevil retrieval. It's not too bad; Torchwood Three's always on call, no matter where they are, and Ianto's been known to sneak in after hours on his days off for a shag, since he and Jack started their—their thing. Their whatever it was that's done now.
Regardless of that, though, the fact remains that, when Ianto blinks his eyes open and finds himself lying on a squeaky, worryingly unstable pull-out bed in his sister's living room with bright, mid-morning sunlight streaming in through the open blinds and Rhiannon clipping coupons at the kitchen table, his first thought is, Oh, right, it's my day off, followed closely afterwards by, So I don't have to get up today if I don't want to.
He's missed the school rush, Mica and David long gone. Johnny's off too; he must have hustled the kids out with him, because it's usually Rhi who takes them but judging from the household budgeting notebook and two medical transcription textbooks on the table by her elbow she's stayed firmly put.
They must have hushed the kids to let him sleep in, and Johnny—Ianto has a vague memory of Johnny in the living room last night, Johnny being quiet, Johnny—
White-hot shame curls up in his gut and he grabs the spare pillow and buries his face in it.
"Morning," Rhi calls from the table. "There's coffee if you want some."
He should get up and have some. Eat something. Piss, because that's a need that's only going to become more pressing in the next ten minutes.
"You planning on getting up?" Rhi asks. He hears the scissors make three snips in quick succession.
"No," he says. He draws the blanket up over his head and shuts his eyes again.
II.
It's in his head now, though. Last night's fuzzy, but he remembers enough to know he told Rhi and Rhi told Johnny; and now both of them know, they know about—they know what happened to him.
About how he was raped.
He's known since it happened, of course, that that's what it was. It's not the first time he's thought the word, even, to himself. But nobody'd said it out loud, not until Rhiannon did last night; when she sat him down and he was shaking, and he'd started telling her and couldn't finish and she asked him, "Sweetheart, did they—" and when she finished the question he nodded into her neck; and then when she told Johnny, later, when they thought he was asleep—when he was half-asleep, when he could have tried to wake up but didn't because for the first time since it happened he didn't feel like he was standing on the edge of a sky rise and looking down.
He barely remembers it, anyway; has more of an idea than a memory of the two of them perched on the edge of the bed next to him and talking late into the night while the warm weight of Rhiannon's hand on his back tethered his semi-conscious thoughts enough they didn't slip into bad places.
Maybe he needed to hear it, he thinks. Like it was a subconscious thing, coming to Rhi's instead of calling his mam or going back to the Hub. He and Jack might be done with their thing, but Jack slept in his bed the first two nights without complaint. Jack might try pushing advice on him if Ianto asked to bunk in his quarters for a night, but Ianto's sure he wouldn't be turned away.
It's not like he didn't know she'd tell Johnny everything. He hadn't thought about it last night, maybe—wasn't thinking that far ahead, not in any logical way—but it's an immutable fact about Rhiannon and Johnny. They don't keep secrets from each other, not about big things, haven't since they got serious back when Ianto was still a kid. Ianto had discovered this when Johnny volunteered to keep him company when Mam and Rhi had work shifts when he was stuck at home with his broken leg and needed help because he couldn't manage the stairs.
Christ. It still makes him flush to think of that, and now? It would be bearable if he didn't know for certain, if he only thought maybe Johnny knew, if he hadn't heard her tell him. If he'd asked her not to. She wouldn't have, if he'd asked. Would have told her husband something bad had happened but Ianto had asked her to keep it between the two of them; he should have, he—but he'd been out of it, last night, by the time it all came tumbling out. Caught up in everything. And Rhiannon just wants to help him, he knows, but—but knowing, every time the two of them look at him now, they're going to know this is a part of him, they're never going not to see it, it makes him want to go home and curl up in his own bed and never come out. And it's in his mind now, too, with all the rest of it, all pinging around so he can't stop running it over back and forth and—
There's a thunk on the coffee table at his side. Ianto chances a squint up past the edge of the pillow. It's tea, of course, in a bright mug with Winnie the Pooh chasing the butterfly on the side and a chip on the rim near the handle. It's still steeping, but he can already smell something—fruity, maybe. Blackcurrant.
Rhiannon's shape leaves the unfocused area in his peripheral vision; she comes back though, and there's another thunk on the coffee table, and he peeks and sees a plate of biscuits on top of a stack of children's books about pirates.
"You should have something," Rhi says, moving away again. Then, "Budge over."
She plops down on the other side of the bed. There's not exactly enough space, because he's got his legs sprawled out some, so she kicks at his shins a little until he moves them.
He's not expecting it when she grabs the pillow and rips it away from his face, balling it up and squashing it behind her lower back as she sits up against the back of the couch.
He'd say something sarcastic, usually, he knows, but his mind draws a big blank when he tries to think up anything appropriate.
Rhi ignores him, stretching over him to grab the remote from the coffee table and flipping on the telly. There's a soap opera just starting, something set around a doctor's surgery. There's some bloke groaning about his wife drawing out a divorce and flirting with a receptionist, which fits, and another doctor acting dramatic about an x-ray—very badly, at that. Ianto doesn't try to follow it, though. He drapes his arm over his face and shuts his eyes back up until the pressure of his bladder makes him curse and stumble up.
"Bring me my tea when you come back?" Rhiannon asks. "It's on the table, I forgot it."
III.
He eats a biscuit when he comes back, because Rhi gives him the stink eye when he passes by the plate without grabbing one.
It's homemade, which surprises him, and tasty, which does not. The same recipe their Nana used to make when they visited her.
"'S good," he says, and he takes a sip of the tea and flops back down on his stomach, burying his face in his arms. The t-shirt of Johnny's that Rhi loaned him last night is worn soft, and when he puts his head down and breathes in he can smell that they still use the same laundry detergent.
Habit after swapping laundry duties for a couple of years, at the house in Ely East, when Mam had a shift and couldn't get to it. They'd done until Rhi moved in with Johnny when he was—what, thirteen? Fourteen? Rhi had stayed on for a while to help, after their dad had left.
His mind's on the house—with the leaky faucet their landlord never got around to fixing in the four years they were there—when Rhiannon brushes her fingers through his hair and—
No.
"Could you," he says, chest tight throat tight fists clenched up tight. "Not touch my hair. Please."
He doesn't know why it was all right last night, but it's very much not today.
She jerks her hand away.
He thinks he should apologize; wants to; but he comes up blank again. His cheeks go hot again, and he blinks and chews his lip, biting back a stab of irrational anger that flares up one second but is gone the next.
But, "Sure," is all Rhiannon says. She sets her hand on his back instead, just touching it at first but pressing down and rubbing circles on it with her palm on it when he doesn't flinch.
"This all right?" she asks.
He nods into his arms and takes a long, deep breath.
"Okay," she says.
IV.
He sits up, eventually, and drinks his tea, which requires enough effort he doesn't bother trying to talk. Rhi doesn't seem to mind; she fills in a few moments with chit-chat but lets him be most of the time. At one point she orders pizza; Ianto knows she and Johnny don't eat out much since having the kids, but she refuses to let him pay when he tells her to use his credit card, paying the delivery guy with two tenners from her purse instead.
It's a lot of effort to pay attention to the telly; he tunes back in now and then, but for the most part he just lets it float by him.
He's busy enough keeping his mind planted in the present.
It keeps trying to slip away—back to the office, back to the SUV, back to the autopsy table when he heaved out Stop stop stop and Owen moved away and let him catch his breath and came back once he did to clean off the shallow cut on his neck and waited for Ianto to say he was okay again before he—
"You know," Rhi says, slipping her hand over his clenched-tight fist and squeezing it. "You had the chubbiest baby hands when you were little. Even when you started kindergarten. Mam called you her roly poly until you asked her to stop, and you remember how Auntie Lucy pinched your cheeks until you were nine?"
He looks away from her and swallows.
He shouldn't be here, he thinks; he can handle this on his own—he should handle this on his own—and he shouldn't be putting all of this on her, and it makes him squirm inside to know she knows, that she's seeing him—like this. Weak. He should have sucked it up and stayed home last night.
But he doesn't want to be alone. More than anything else.
"Oh, d'you know they're going to have a gay wedding on here?" she asks him, nodding at the screen. "About time if you ask me. They say maybe it'll be legal in a few years, proper. Mica's got a friend of hers from preschool who's got two mummies, and the trouble they had to go through before the civil partnerships came through, you'd—oh, I think this one accidentally killed a patient at his old hospital. I don't watch them much, but you see the ads for them in the morning, and Mam's got them on sometimes when we visit."
She keeps chattering until he's got a hold of himself again and doesn't let go of his hand until she has to get up to answer the door.
V.
He's curled up on his side again by that point, head buried in the sheets so the tips of his hair just brush the side of her knee.
She's still got a hold of his hand, though she's stopped the commentary in favor of paying some attention to Coronation Street, which is a quarter into the day's episode.
Ianto couldn't tell you what it's about.
He started thinking of things again during an ad break, things he didn't want to think of, and he couldn't stop thinking of them, so he curled up, held his sister's hand and fixed his eyes on the yards of soft, beige fabric tufted up around him, breathed in and breathed out, in and out, stared at his sister's spare sheets and filled his mind with beige to crowd out anything else that tried to pop in.
It's almost like it was last night. It's him and the sheets and his deep, deep breaths in one circle of existence, and Rhiannon and the TV in another that he can peek into if he really tries, and then the rest of the world in its own circle somewhere far, far beyond that.
So it's like a doorbell sounds to a fish in its bowl, to Ianto, when Rhiannon's rings.
"Oh, they're early," she says, and she lets go of his hand and swings her legs off the pull-out and squeezes his upper arm on her way past. He listens, more or less. "I asked a friend from the parents' group to bring Mica home today. Her daughter's one of Mica's best friends, and she's been begging for a playdate."
hands under his armpits, when they picked him up to put on the table, a thread from his sweater snarling on a ring and—
Long breath in, long breath out, he thinks, and watches the sheets shiver in front of his nose.
"Hello," his sister says, somewhere else entirely.
VI.
"Ianto," Rhi says, and he knows it's the third time in a row she's said it without having noticed her saying the first two. She touches his shoulder, shakes him just a little. "He says he's a friend of yours."
That cuts through the fuzz.
He's reaching for his gun as he heaves himself up, hand grabbing at the waistband of Johnny's spare flannel pants, eyes sweeping the room for the threat and landing on—
"Hey, Ianto," Owen Harper says.
VII.
Ianto does, when Owen mentions it, vaguely, sort of, maybe remember Owen mumbling something about a blood test in his direction when Ianto left the night before.
Ianto does not remember having agreed to go the the Hub for them on his day off, but Owen says Jack told him it was set, and most of the previous day is a little...fuzzy. Fuzzy, when he thinks of it. So he's willing to believe that at some point Jack brought it up with him and he said, "Yeah, sure," just to make it look like he was paying attention.
It doesn't explain how—or, for that matter, why—Owen's showed up at Rhiannon's when Ianto hasn't updated her address in his next-of-kin sheet since the last time she and Johnny moved, back when he was still in London.
Makes sense the second Owen opens his mouth.
"We tried calling," he says, very clearly making an effort to look pleasant and happy for Rhiannon's sake and utterly failing. "And texting. You left your phone in your Jeep, you sod."
"Ah," Ianto says.
"Yes," Owen says back. "Ah."
See, if Owen were Ianto and Ianto were Owen—which is to say, if Owen were a twenty-four-year-old man with a recent history of multiple traumatic events who had just been raped and nearly murdered and if Ianto were a grumpy English doctor who'd probably found out, from Owen's boss, that Owen had, after one of the more recent traumatic events (involving cannibals), had an incident with some whiskey and a bottle of painkillers, Ianto might have looked at Owen's missing a medical appointment, looked up the trace from his cell phone, and seen that it had been parked on a residential street in a somewhat rougher side of town far from his own flat for something like sixteen hours without moving.
And if Ianto were Owen—and, likely, Jack—he probably would have rushed right over with visions of drug overdoses and carbon monoxide-assisted naps in his head.
"Sorry," Ianto says.
VIII.
"I work for public health," Owen lies when Rhiannon asks, "At the tourist centre?", somewhat baffled, now he's drawing Ianto's blood in her living room, at his statement that he and Ianto work together.
"There's office space behind the centre," Ianto says. "So we eat lunches together, sometimes."
"And Ianto's brilliant with the coffee machine." Owen's got two vacuum tubes full of Ianto's blood, but looks like he's going for five today. Joy.
Ianto yanks his thoughts back before they stray towards the nebulous murk of 'What Owen's testing for.'
Part of him wants to know every single test Owen's going to run, but he has enough sense not to ask. He knows how he can get; when he found his dad in London, first, he'd spent practically all his free time for the first three weeks researching alcoholism at the library. He'd kept a tabbed folder with all the information he found, pored over it at night when he couldn't sleep and printed off anything that looked remotely helpful.
All it had done, in the end, was make him worry even more about mortality statistics from cirrhosis.
He has just enough self-awareness to know that he's got too much on his plate already to deal with that.
Besides, most of the things Owen's looking for, probably, are easily treatable with antibiotics. So there's no need to worry about it.
No need at all.
He pinches the edge of the top sheet between the thumb and forefinger of his right hand and rubs the soft material. Owen, bent over his left arm, catches the movement with a quick, sharp look, but he doesn't comment.
"I was in the area," he says instead, not raising his voice but clearly including Rhi. "I remembered you'd texted Jack you were staying here last night, and I got him to pull the address from your emergency contact form. Figured we might as well get it over with."
Pat explanation for Rhiannon and a veiled expression of concern for Ianto's well-being. Owen's at Peak Human Interaction today. It's an honest effort on his part.
"Department's running a public health awareness campaign for iron and vitamin deficiencies, and Ianto volunteered to—"
"I told her what happened," Ianto mutters.
"Oh, never mind then," Owen says.
IX.
"Not that I'm a bloody telegram service," Owen mutters when he's repacking his kit. "But Jack wanted to make it clear you can call him if you need anything." The tubes with blood go in a padded pocket, already labeled with a sharpie he had in his pocket. "Whenever. Or, y'know. Whoever."
Ianto huffs. "Yeah, thanks."
The kit snaps shut, Owen smoothing his hand over it to make sure the velcro catches and zipping up the side. "Really, though. Jack—"
Rhiannon, in the kitchen, noisily turns a page in the textbook she's been leafing through.
"Just, whenever," Owen finishes. He straps the bag back on and stands. "Idiot. At least call in if you're taking tomorrow off."
He apologizes to Rhiannon for showing up as he leaves, departing with a paper cup of her blackcurrant tea.
X.
"He seems nice."
Rhiannon makes more tea once Owen's gone. Ianto looks like he needs the caffeine, she says. She comes back to the couch with his refilled mug and the plate of biscuits, which she holds out to him until he eats another.
"He's a prick, usually." He takes another biscuit under Rhi's watchful eye and bites in. Dealing with Owen was fine, and he'd rather not have his blood taken in the morgue, but it was tiring enough. He feels drained.
"Still."
He shrugs. "Yeah, he's fine." He leans back, stretches out on the couch and crosses his arms over his chest. "I should shower."
Rhi chuckles. "Brush your teeth at least, god. I did some laundry before you woke up, if you want to change. Maybe before the kids get home?"
"Yeah." It's still early, though, by the clock in the kitchen, and he doesn't think Mica's due back for a while. "I'll just. Twenty more minutes."
Rhi pats him on the arm and settles back beside him. He thinks, for a second, she's going to hug him, but she grabs the remote and turns the TV back up instead.
"Drink your tea," she says, and kicks off her shoes.
XI.
Mica's shy around him at first, in that little-kid way four-year-olds fall into when they're faced with strange relatives and unusually tall men—which makes Ianto a double threat.
She's snuggled up on his lap and refusing to let go within a half hour, though.
"They're attracted to fear," Rhi says wisely, hiding the biscuits and mixing up some hot cocoa. "So adults who are terrified of children are catnip to them. Sorry."
She's not sorry at all, but when she helps him fold the sofa bed back up she tells him he can tell Mica to buzz off if he wants.
He's still debating it when Mica decides he makes a wonderful spot for her post-school nap.
And that's fine, actually. She's...fine.
"She's cute," he tells Rhi over his cocoa. The cocoa's good, too. Rhi's always had a way with it.
Rhi grins. "Give it a couple years and you'll be wanting one of your own."
He freezes, and being intensely aware of Mica on his lap is the only reason he doesn't jolt up from the couch.
"Ianto," his sister says, soft. "Sweetheart, it's fine. Come on, it's okay. Did you—is that something you've thought about before?"
A lump forms up in his throat, right at the top where it meets his throat. He swallows it down and shrugs.
XII.
"This isn't the—this isn't the end of the world," Rhiannon says. "I don't, if that's what it feels like, I'm sorry. I don't—not that everything's going to be okay, but this doesn't mean you're never going to have anything good in your life again. You can still have that with someone, bach, even if you have to take your time. You've got so much ahead of you. Even if—was there someone? Is there?"
He shrugs again, and blinks.
"Not after this."
Mica's snoring, in her sleep. She's got her nose smushed into the crook of his arm, and her breaths feather out over his skin and tickle his elbow.
"Cariad." She scooches closer, wraps her arm around him so her hand's just resting on the top of Mica's head. "If anyone breaks things off because this happened to you, you're better off without her. And it doesn't mean you—"
He tenses up, is the thing, because there's lying and then there's lying to his family, and one of those he's better at.
"Ianto, I know you keep your life more private than a teenaged boy keeps his dirty mags, but have you—" she pauses, clearly trying to put it gently. "Have you actually talked to her about this?"
He shrugs again. Bites his lip. Mica shifts in his arms, and he settles back into the couch and consciously tries to relax.
"Not." He swallows. "Not explicitly. But—"
He almost says, he knows what happened, but catches himself just in time. He takes a breath.
"We weren't even—we weren't serious. It was just fun. But I'd thought, maybe—"
Jesus Christ.
He'd thought about it, what it could be like. Jack making himself at home in his apartment; Ianto spending several nights in a row at the Hub, nights where they made supper and watched some telly and maybe even fell asleep before sex, maybe even going out on a date somewhere. Maybe more than that, somewhere very far and very, very nebulous down the line.
"Doesn't matter now. I can't expect someone I was casual with to wait indefinitely until I'm not a—"
"Don't." She squeezes his arm, fierce. "You're worth waiting for as long as you need, and if someone else can't see that, it's on them. But don't count out people who care about you, if you don't know, just because—because of whatever this thing's making you feel like right now, because if you're feeling like you're not good enough for anyone, that's absolute shit."
He bites the inside of his cheek and taps the fingers of his left hand on his thigh until his eyes stop burning.
XIII.
Johnny and David blow in a quarter hour later with a gust that slams the door open with a bang that makes Ianto jump and jolts Mica awake.
She squeals, "Daddy!" and flings herself off Ianto's lap to run over.
Rhi, who's poking through the fridge, yells, "David, wipe your feet! And say hello to your uncle!" without looking up.
David pauses on the third step up the stairs to turn with a cheerful, "Hi, Uncle Ianto! D'you know you snore? Mam says you've done since you were a baby."
He's vanished to the first floor before Ianto can even think of a reply.
Johnny Ianto's been worrying about, in the back of his mind, all day; because he's a nice guy, but he's no shrinking violet, and he's more tactile in a day than Ianto is in a year. But he just walks up past the couch, Mica on his shoulder, and slaps Ianto on the back as he passes with a, "Hey, Ianto. Staying for tea?"
"Course he is," Rhi says.
Ianto gulps down the last of his tea and sets the cup down. "I don't want to impose, if I—"
"Don't be an idiot," Rhi breaks in.
"Course you're staying." Johnny grins. "You know you're always welcome."
Ianto settles back into the corner of the couch and slumps down in it, and a wave of warm, comfortable exhaustion washes over him.
XIV.
He didn't intend to stay over again originally, but he ends up helping David with his homework after supper while Rhi does the laundry when Johnny gets called in to cover a last-minute work order.
He's pretty sure Rhi keeps him busy on purpose after, asking him to help with the dishes and putting away the leftovers while she gives Mica a bath and puts the kids to bed, and then she asks him to make some tea while she sets the laundry to wash, and then she guilts him into drinking some tea while she puts Strictly on the TV and bustles around, obviously catching up on some of the things she put off so she could sit on a couch with him all day long.
He can't exactly say no when she asks after she's let him do an impression of a lump in her living room for twenty-four straight hours.
Then it's half past ten, somehow, and Johnny's back, and at some point when Ianto gets up to put his mug in the sink Johnny clears the couch of cushions and yanks the pull-out free again, and Rhi comes out of the tiny laundry room with a freshly-dried set of sheets, and Ianto tries to say he should head out, but she just goes, "Oh, hush," and tells him to help her with the fitted sheet.
She washed the spare pajamas, too, and hustles him off to change with a toothbrush Johnny picked up from the pound store on his way back from work, apparently. When he makes it out of the bathroom, his PEP pills, which he had in his pocket last night, are sitting on the coffee table next to a glass of water, and Johnny's just heading upstairs.
"We mean it, you know," Johnny says with a grin that's just this side of too casual. "You're welcome any time, mate."
He's off upstairs before Ianto can flush, and it's just a couple minutes before Ianto hears the shower turn on.
"Get some sleep," Rhiannon says, leaning up to peck him on the cheek when she heads up. "You can sleep in tomorrow again, if you want to skive off."
XV.
He flings his arm out when he wakes up, a flail that would have Jack talking about remedial lessons if they were on the practice mat in the training room at the Hub. Uncoordinated as it is, it makes solid contact—with not a little force behind it—and sends the glass of water flying off the coffee table.
It lands on the carpet, at least, so it breaks into a few pieces rather than shatter on the linoleum, but it makes enough noise it knocks him wide awake.
He curses and sits up, looking around for where he left his shoes.
"Ianto?" The stairway light flicks on, and Rhi's careful steps follow her voice on her way down.
"Shit," he mutters. "Sorry, I'm fine, it's fine. Knocked my glass off the table. D'you know where my shoes are?"
Rhi switches on the living room light and squints at him for a second while her eyes adjust.
"Under the table," she says. "I'll grab them for you, don't cut yourself."
She's in canvas sneakers for some reason, though she's clearly just out of bed, hair wild and pajamas rumpled. He doesn't try to puzzle it out, but jams his feet into his shoes as soon as she hands them over.
"Get back to bed," he tells her. "I'll clean this up, didn't mean to wake you."
She shrugs. "It'll go faster with two, don't fuss."
They go over the carpet carefully to make sure they haven't missed any pieces. Rhi says she'll hoover in the morning, but she doesn't want the kids to step on anything if they come down for some water before she's up.
"David's at the stage he doesn't wake us when he has a nightmare," she says, and if it's meant as a pointed hint it doesn't sound like it, but Ianto shifts at it enough it grabs her attention. Her mouth softens.
"Sorry I woke you," he starts. He scrunches up the top of the paper bag they've put the glass in. It crinkles in his grip. "I'm keeping you up again, and you're—"
"Hush, bach," she says again, like she did last night. "You're my little brother. You're not supposed to get hurt, but if you do I don't want you to feel like you're a bother. Ever. You understand?"
He nods.
"Good." She takes the bag from him and stands, using his shoulder to lever herself up and giving him a gentle push back towards the bed when he follows. "Now get some sleep, unless you want to have some tea and company?"
She lets it alone when he flops back towards the bed with a, "I'm fine, fine," kicking off his shoes as soon as he's on it.
She sets the bag on the lid of the trash bin and plods back upstairs with another, "Good night," taking the lights off with her.
He shuts his eyes, obediently, and takes a long, deep breath and tells himself to sleep.
XVI.
His eyes burst open again a half minute later, the phantom sensation of hands on his neck prodding him awake before he's properly asleep.
Bollocks.
It's a little past two, from what he can see of the kitchen clock from the light of the streetlamps that filters in through the cracks in the blinds on the windows.
Four hours before he needs to wake up, if he wants to go to work tomorrow. He's not sure if he does.
He stares into the dark and drums his thumbs on the edge of the topmost quilt, counting in his breaths. His sister's living room ceiling, unfortunately, doesn't hold any answers for him, even bathed in mysterious shadows as it is, this time of night.
Christ, he just needs to sleep. He just needs—
Hell, he doesn't know. There's probably something out there that can help him, something that'll make him feel better long enough to get some rest, but fuck if he knows what it is.
He'd thought he could push through it like he did after Brynblaidd, that it would be something like the same thing, maybe; because that was awful and this is awful, and it's all trauma, like the therapists Owen mentioned would call it. It was so close to the same thing, both times; someone taking him prisoner and him being scared for his life; just ten, fifteen minutes different, really, and it makes no sense that ten or fifteen minutes should make that much of a difference, not when it hadn't even hurt him as much as the beating in Brynblaidd.
It's just so stupid.
He swipes his palm across his eyes and feels atop the coffee table for the pile of napkins that they didn't clean up after takeout on the couch, grabs the first one he can find and blows his nose.
There's a noise upstairs, a creaking bed and footsteps and, a little later, a toilet flushing and water gurgling its way up the pipes to the sink.
It's fine, he thinks, and he catches his breath in the quiet that follows and feels his heart slow its rabbit thump in his chest.
The footsteps in the upstairs bathroom pad back to a bedroom and shut the door, and soon enough the house is asleep again above him, and Ianto's alone.
And, okay, he thinks, when he looks at the shadows on the ceiling again and feels them start to grow. Okay.
XVII.
He reaches over to the coffee table again, and slides his hand across it until his fingers bump into his phone. It's charging there, has been since he brought it in while Rhi was cooking, volume all the way turned down.
He opens it up and x-es out of all the new message and missed call alerts that pop up when the screen turns on. He navigates to his contacts page instead, and scrolls down to Jack's name, and clicks on it and brings the phone up to his ear.
"Ianto?" Jack asks after just one ring.
Ianto lets out a breath, and he tucks his free hand under the covers where it's warm and pulls them up to his neck.
"Hey," he says, and he sinks down into the thin, squeaky mattress and lets his eyelids flutter shut in a long and tired blink.
Fandom: Torchwood
Characters: Ianto, Rhiannon, Owen, Johnny, Mica, David, Jack
Rating: T
Word Count: 5883
Notes: Written for Febuwhump 2024, Day 13, "You weren't supposed to get hurt."; this part does not contain any graphic scenes, but deals with ongoing aftermath/recovery from sexual assault
Directly follows after the bubble; series starts with our share of night and continues in here a mist, and there a mist.
Summary: Ianto spends the better part of thirty hours on his sister's couch and tries to work out what he needs.
I.
It's Ianto's day off when he wakes up at Rhiannon's.
Days off with Torchwood Three are, for most staff, scarcer than they would have been at One, with two of them rarely occurring in a row. Not so much for Ianto, who'd work month-long jags in a go without a break at One, sometimes, then have four or five days off when things were quiet; but that was less because of where he worked than who, exactly, he worked for directly. Yvonne Hartman didn't have much time for staff who didn't spend as much time on the job as she, but she quite liked Ianto.
Now, at Three, Jack's started interfering with the schedule to make Ianto take time off when Ianto doesn't put it in himself, ever since that one time he got a little lightheaded during a weevil retrieval. It's not too bad; Torchwood Three's always on call, no matter where they are, and Ianto's been known to sneak in after hours on his days off for a shag, since he and Jack started their—their thing. Their whatever it was that's done now.
Regardless of that, though, the fact remains that, when Ianto blinks his eyes open and finds himself lying on a squeaky, worryingly unstable pull-out bed in his sister's living room with bright, mid-morning sunlight streaming in through the open blinds and Rhiannon clipping coupons at the kitchen table, his first thought is, Oh, right, it's my day off, followed closely afterwards by, So I don't have to get up today if I don't want to.
He's missed the school rush, Mica and David long gone. Johnny's off too; he must have hustled the kids out with him, because it's usually Rhi who takes them but judging from the household budgeting notebook and two medical transcription textbooks on the table by her elbow she's stayed firmly put.
They must have hushed the kids to let him sleep in, and Johnny—Ianto has a vague memory of Johnny in the living room last night, Johnny being quiet, Johnny—
White-hot shame curls up in his gut and he grabs the spare pillow and buries his face in it.
"Morning," Rhi calls from the table. "There's coffee if you want some."
He should get up and have some. Eat something. Piss, because that's a need that's only going to become more pressing in the next ten minutes.
"You planning on getting up?" Rhi asks. He hears the scissors make three snips in quick succession.
"No," he says. He draws the blanket up over his head and shuts his eyes again.
II.
It's in his head now, though. Last night's fuzzy, but he remembers enough to know he told Rhi and Rhi told Johnny; and now both of them know, they know about—they know what happened to him.
About how he was raped.
He's known since it happened, of course, that that's what it was. It's not the first time he's thought the word, even, to himself. But nobody'd said it out loud, not until Rhiannon did last night; when she sat him down and he was shaking, and he'd started telling her and couldn't finish and she asked him, "Sweetheart, did they—" and when she finished the question he nodded into her neck; and then when she told Johnny, later, when they thought he was asleep—when he was half-asleep, when he could have tried to wake up but didn't because for the first time since it happened he didn't feel like he was standing on the edge of a sky rise and looking down.
He barely remembers it, anyway; has more of an idea than a memory of the two of them perched on the edge of the bed next to him and talking late into the night while the warm weight of Rhiannon's hand on his back tethered his semi-conscious thoughts enough they didn't slip into bad places.
Maybe he needed to hear it, he thinks. Like it was a subconscious thing, coming to Rhi's instead of calling his mam or going back to the Hub. He and Jack might be done with their thing, but Jack slept in his bed the first two nights without complaint. Jack might try pushing advice on him if Ianto asked to bunk in his quarters for a night, but Ianto's sure he wouldn't be turned away.
It's not like he didn't know she'd tell Johnny everything. He hadn't thought about it last night, maybe—wasn't thinking that far ahead, not in any logical way—but it's an immutable fact about Rhiannon and Johnny. They don't keep secrets from each other, not about big things, haven't since they got serious back when Ianto was still a kid. Ianto had discovered this when Johnny volunteered to keep him company when Mam and Rhi had work shifts when he was stuck at home with his broken leg and needed help because he couldn't manage the stairs.
Christ. It still makes him flush to think of that, and now? It would be bearable if he didn't know for certain, if he only thought maybe Johnny knew, if he hadn't heard her tell him. If he'd asked her not to. She wouldn't have, if he'd asked. Would have told her husband something bad had happened but Ianto had asked her to keep it between the two of them; he should have, he—but he'd been out of it, last night, by the time it all came tumbling out. Caught up in everything. And Rhiannon just wants to help him, he knows, but—but knowing, every time the two of them look at him now, they're going to know this is a part of him, they're never going not to see it, it makes him want to go home and curl up in his own bed and never come out. And it's in his mind now, too, with all the rest of it, all pinging around so he can't stop running it over back and forth and—
There's a thunk on the coffee table at his side. Ianto chances a squint up past the edge of the pillow. It's tea, of course, in a bright mug with Winnie the Pooh chasing the butterfly on the side and a chip on the rim near the handle. It's still steeping, but he can already smell something—fruity, maybe. Blackcurrant.
Rhiannon's shape leaves the unfocused area in his peripheral vision; she comes back though, and there's another thunk on the coffee table, and he peeks and sees a plate of biscuits on top of a stack of children's books about pirates.
"You should have something," Rhi says, moving away again. Then, "Budge over."
She plops down on the other side of the bed. There's not exactly enough space, because he's got his legs sprawled out some, so she kicks at his shins a little until he moves them.
He's not expecting it when she grabs the pillow and rips it away from his face, balling it up and squashing it behind her lower back as she sits up against the back of the couch.
He'd say something sarcastic, usually, he knows, but his mind draws a big blank when he tries to think up anything appropriate.
Rhi ignores him, stretching over him to grab the remote from the coffee table and flipping on the telly. There's a soap opera just starting, something set around a doctor's surgery. There's some bloke groaning about his wife drawing out a divorce and flirting with a receptionist, which fits, and another doctor acting dramatic about an x-ray—very badly, at that. Ianto doesn't try to follow it, though. He drapes his arm over his face and shuts his eyes back up until the pressure of his bladder makes him curse and stumble up.
"Bring me my tea when you come back?" Rhiannon asks. "It's on the table, I forgot it."
III.
He eats a biscuit when he comes back, because Rhi gives him the stink eye when he passes by the plate without grabbing one.
It's homemade, which surprises him, and tasty, which does not. The same recipe their Nana used to make when they visited her.
"'S good," he says, and he takes a sip of the tea and flops back down on his stomach, burying his face in his arms. The t-shirt of Johnny's that Rhi loaned him last night is worn soft, and when he puts his head down and breathes in he can smell that they still use the same laundry detergent.
Habit after swapping laundry duties for a couple of years, at the house in Ely East, when Mam had a shift and couldn't get to it. They'd done until Rhi moved in with Johnny when he was—what, thirteen? Fourteen? Rhi had stayed on for a while to help, after their dad had left.
His mind's on the house—with the leaky faucet their landlord never got around to fixing in the four years they were there—when Rhiannon brushes her fingers through his hair and—
No.
"Could you," he says, chest tight throat tight fists clenched up tight. "Not touch my hair. Please."
He doesn't know why it was all right last night, but it's very much not today.
She jerks her hand away.
He thinks he should apologize; wants to; but he comes up blank again. His cheeks go hot again, and he blinks and chews his lip, biting back a stab of irrational anger that flares up one second but is gone the next.
But, "Sure," is all Rhiannon says. She sets her hand on his back instead, just touching it at first but pressing down and rubbing circles on it with her palm on it when he doesn't flinch.
"This all right?" she asks.
He nods into his arms and takes a long, deep breath.
"Okay," she says.
IV.
He sits up, eventually, and drinks his tea, which requires enough effort he doesn't bother trying to talk. Rhi doesn't seem to mind; she fills in a few moments with chit-chat but lets him be most of the time. At one point she orders pizza; Ianto knows she and Johnny don't eat out much since having the kids, but she refuses to let him pay when he tells her to use his credit card, paying the delivery guy with two tenners from her purse instead.
It's a lot of effort to pay attention to the telly; he tunes back in now and then, but for the most part he just lets it float by him.
He's busy enough keeping his mind planted in the present.
It keeps trying to slip away—back to the office, back to the SUV, back to the autopsy table when he heaved out Stop stop stop and Owen moved away and let him catch his breath and came back once he did to clean off the shallow cut on his neck and waited for Ianto to say he was okay again before he—
"You know," Rhi says, slipping her hand over his clenched-tight fist and squeezing it. "You had the chubbiest baby hands when you were little. Even when you started kindergarten. Mam called you her roly poly until you asked her to stop, and you remember how Auntie Lucy pinched your cheeks until you were nine?"
He looks away from her and swallows.
He shouldn't be here, he thinks; he can handle this on his own—he should handle this on his own—and he shouldn't be putting all of this on her, and it makes him squirm inside to know she knows, that she's seeing him—like this. Weak. He should have sucked it up and stayed home last night.
But he doesn't want to be alone. More than anything else.
"Oh, d'you know they're going to have a gay wedding on here?" she asks him, nodding at the screen. "About time if you ask me. They say maybe it'll be legal in a few years, proper. Mica's got a friend of hers from preschool who's got two mummies, and the trouble they had to go through before the civil partnerships came through, you'd—oh, I think this one accidentally killed a patient at his old hospital. I don't watch them much, but you see the ads for them in the morning, and Mam's got them on sometimes when we visit."
She keeps chattering until he's got a hold of himself again and doesn't let go of his hand until she has to get up to answer the door.
V.
He's curled up on his side again by that point, head buried in the sheets so the tips of his hair just brush the side of her knee.
She's still got a hold of his hand, though she's stopped the commentary in favor of paying some attention to Coronation Street, which is a quarter into the day's episode.
Ianto couldn't tell you what it's about.
He started thinking of things again during an ad break, things he didn't want to think of, and he couldn't stop thinking of them, so he curled up, held his sister's hand and fixed his eyes on the yards of soft, beige fabric tufted up around him, breathed in and breathed out, in and out, stared at his sister's spare sheets and filled his mind with beige to crowd out anything else that tried to pop in.
It's almost like it was last night. It's him and the sheets and his deep, deep breaths in one circle of existence, and Rhiannon and the TV in another that he can peek into if he really tries, and then the rest of the world in its own circle somewhere far, far beyond that.
So it's like a doorbell sounds to a fish in its bowl, to Ianto, when Rhiannon's rings.
"Oh, they're early," she says, and she lets go of his hand and swings her legs off the pull-out and squeezes his upper arm on her way past. He listens, more or less. "I asked a friend from the parents' group to bring Mica home today. Her daughter's one of Mica's best friends, and she's been begging for a playdate."
hands under his armpits, when they picked him up to put on the table, a thread from his sweater snarling on a ring and—
Long breath in, long breath out, he thinks, and watches the sheets shiver in front of his nose.
"Hello," his sister says, somewhere else entirely.
VI.
"Ianto," Rhi says, and he knows it's the third time in a row she's said it without having noticed her saying the first two. She touches his shoulder, shakes him just a little. "He says he's a friend of yours."
That cuts through the fuzz.
He's reaching for his gun as he heaves himself up, hand grabbing at the waistband of Johnny's spare flannel pants, eyes sweeping the room for the threat and landing on—
"Hey, Ianto," Owen Harper says.
VII.
Ianto does, when Owen mentions it, vaguely, sort of, maybe remember Owen mumbling something about a blood test in his direction when Ianto left the night before.
Ianto does not remember having agreed to go the the Hub for them on his day off, but Owen says Jack told him it was set, and most of the previous day is a little...fuzzy. Fuzzy, when he thinks of it. So he's willing to believe that at some point Jack brought it up with him and he said, "Yeah, sure," just to make it look like he was paying attention.
It doesn't explain how—or, for that matter, why—Owen's showed up at Rhiannon's when Ianto hasn't updated her address in his next-of-kin sheet since the last time she and Johnny moved, back when he was still in London.
Makes sense the second Owen opens his mouth.
"We tried calling," he says, very clearly making an effort to look pleasant and happy for Rhiannon's sake and utterly failing. "And texting. You left your phone in your Jeep, you sod."
"Ah," Ianto says.
"Yes," Owen says back. "Ah."
See, if Owen were Ianto and Ianto were Owen—which is to say, if Owen were a twenty-four-year-old man with a recent history of multiple traumatic events who had just been raped and nearly murdered and if Ianto were a grumpy English doctor who'd probably found out, from Owen's boss, that Owen had, after one of the more recent traumatic events (involving cannibals), had an incident with some whiskey and a bottle of painkillers, Ianto might have looked at Owen's missing a medical appointment, looked up the trace from his cell phone, and seen that it had been parked on a residential street in a somewhat rougher side of town far from his own flat for something like sixteen hours without moving.
And if Ianto were Owen—and, likely, Jack—he probably would have rushed right over with visions of drug overdoses and carbon monoxide-assisted naps in his head.
"Sorry," Ianto says.
VIII.
"I work for public health," Owen lies when Rhiannon asks, "At the tourist centre?", somewhat baffled, now he's drawing Ianto's blood in her living room, at his statement that he and Ianto work together.
"There's office space behind the centre," Ianto says. "So we eat lunches together, sometimes."
"And Ianto's brilliant with the coffee machine." Owen's got two vacuum tubes full of Ianto's blood, but looks like he's going for five today. Joy.
Ianto yanks his thoughts back before they stray towards the nebulous murk of 'What Owen's testing for.'
Part of him wants to know every single test Owen's going to run, but he has enough sense not to ask. He knows how he can get; when he found his dad in London, first, he'd spent practically all his free time for the first three weeks researching alcoholism at the library. He'd kept a tabbed folder with all the information he found, pored over it at night when he couldn't sleep and printed off anything that looked remotely helpful.
All it had done, in the end, was make him worry even more about mortality statistics from cirrhosis.
He has just enough self-awareness to know that he's got too much on his plate already to deal with that.
Besides, most of the things Owen's looking for, probably, are easily treatable with antibiotics. So there's no need to worry about it.
No need at all.
He pinches the edge of the top sheet between the thumb and forefinger of his right hand and rubs the soft material. Owen, bent over his left arm, catches the movement with a quick, sharp look, but he doesn't comment.
"I was in the area," he says instead, not raising his voice but clearly including Rhi. "I remembered you'd texted Jack you were staying here last night, and I got him to pull the address from your emergency contact form. Figured we might as well get it over with."
Pat explanation for Rhiannon and a veiled expression of concern for Ianto's well-being. Owen's at Peak Human Interaction today. It's an honest effort on his part.
"Department's running a public health awareness campaign for iron and vitamin deficiencies, and Ianto volunteered to—"
"I told her what happened," Ianto mutters.
"Oh, never mind then," Owen says.
IX.
"Not that I'm a bloody telegram service," Owen mutters when he's repacking his kit. "But Jack wanted to make it clear you can call him if you need anything." The tubes with blood go in a padded pocket, already labeled with a sharpie he had in his pocket. "Whenever. Or, y'know. Whoever."
Ianto huffs. "Yeah, thanks."
The kit snaps shut, Owen smoothing his hand over it to make sure the velcro catches and zipping up the side. "Really, though. Jack—"
Rhiannon, in the kitchen, noisily turns a page in the textbook she's been leafing through.
"Just, whenever," Owen finishes. He straps the bag back on and stands. "Idiot. At least call in if you're taking tomorrow off."
He apologizes to Rhiannon for showing up as he leaves, departing with a paper cup of her blackcurrant tea.
X.
"He seems nice."
Rhiannon makes more tea once Owen's gone. Ianto looks like he needs the caffeine, she says. She comes back to the couch with his refilled mug and the plate of biscuits, which she holds out to him until he eats another.
"He's a prick, usually." He takes another biscuit under Rhi's watchful eye and bites in. Dealing with Owen was fine, and he'd rather not have his blood taken in the morgue, but it was tiring enough. He feels drained.
"Still."
He shrugs. "Yeah, he's fine." He leans back, stretches out on the couch and crosses his arms over his chest. "I should shower."
Rhi chuckles. "Brush your teeth at least, god. I did some laundry before you woke up, if you want to change. Maybe before the kids get home?"
"Yeah." It's still early, though, by the clock in the kitchen, and he doesn't think Mica's due back for a while. "I'll just. Twenty more minutes."
Rhi pats him on the arm and settles back beside him. He thinks, for a second, she's going to hug him, but she grabs the remote and turns the TV back up instead.
"Drink your tea," she says, and kicks off her shoes.
XI.
Mica's shy around him at first, in that little-kid way four-year-olds fall into when they're faced with strange relatives and unusually tall men—which makes Ianto a double threat.
She's snuggled up on his lap and refusing to let go within a half hour, though.
"They're attracted to fear," Rhi says wisely, hiding the biscuits and mixing up some hot cocoa. "So adults who are terrified of children are catnip to them. Sorry."
She's not sorry at all, but when she helps him fold the sofa bed back up she tells him he can tell Mica to buzz off if he wants.
He's still debating it when Mica decides he makes a wonderful spot for her post-school nap.
And that's fine, actually. She's...fine.
"She's cute," he tells Rhi over his cocoa. The cocoa's good, too. Rhi's always had a way with it.
Rhi grins. "Give it a couple years and you'll be wanting one of your own."
He freezes, and being intensely aware of Mica on his lap is the only reason he doesn't jolt up from the couch.
"Ianto," his sister says, soft. "Sweetheart, it's fine. Come on, it's okay. Did you—is that something you've thought about before?"
A lump forms up in his throat, right at the top where it meets his throat. He swallows it down and shrugs.
XII.
"This isn't the—this isn't the end of the world," Rhiannon says. "I don't, if that's what it feels like, I'm sorry. I don't—not that everything's going to be okay, but this doesn't mean you're never going to have anything good in your life again. You can still have that with someone, bach, even if you have to take your time. You've got so much ahead of you. Even if—was there someone? Is there?"
He shrugs again, and blinks.
"Not after this."
Mica's snoring, in her sleep. She's got her nose smushed into the crook of his arm, and her breaths feather out over his skin and tickle his elbow.
"Cariad." She scooches closer, wraps her arm around him so her hand's just resting on the top of Mica's head. "If anyone breaks things off because this happened to you, you're better off without her. And it doesn't mean you—"
He tenses up, is the thing, because there's lying and then there's lying to his family, and one of those he's better at.
"Ianto, I know you keep your life more private than a teenaged boy keeps his dirty mags, but have you—" she pauses, clearly trying to put it gently. "Have you actually talked to her about this?"
He shrugs again. Bites his lip. Mica shifts in his arms, and he settles back into the couch and consciously tries to relax.
"Not." He swallows. "Not explicitly. But—"
He almost says, he knows what happened, but catches himself just in time. He takes a breath.
"We weren't even—we weren't serious. It was just fun. But I'd thought, maybe—"
Jesus Christ.
He'd thought about it, what it could be like. Jack making himself at home in his apartment; Ianto spending several nights in a row at the Hub, nights where they made supper and watched some telly and maybe even fell asleep before sex, maybe even going out on a date somewhere. Maybe more than that, somewhere very far and very, very nebulous down the line.
"Doesn't matter now. I can't expect someone I was casual with to wait indefinitely until I'm not a—"
"Don't." She squeezes his arm, fierce. "You're worth waiting for as long as you need, and if someone else can't see that, it's on them. But don't count out people who care about you, if you don't know, just because—because of whatever this thing's making you feel like right now, because if you're feeling like you're not good enough for anyone, that's absolute shit."
He bites the inside of his cheek and taps the fingers of his left hand on his thigh until his eyes stop burning.
XIII.
Johnny and David blow in a quarter hour later with a gust that slams the door open with a bang that makes Ianto jump and jolts Mica awake.
She squeals, "Daddy!" and flings herself off Ianto's lap to run over.
Rhi, who's poking through the fridge, yells, "David, wipe your feet! And say hello to your uncle!" without looking up.
David pauses on the third step up the stairs to turn with a cheerful, "Hi, Uncle Ianto! D'you know you snore? Mam says you've done since you were a baby."
He's vanished to the first floor before Ianto can even think of a reply.
Johnny Ianto's been worrying about, in the back of his mind, all day; because he's a nice guy, but he's no shrinking violet, and he's more tactile in a day than Ianto is in a year. But he just walks up past the couch, Mica on his shoulder, and slaps Ianto on the back as he passes with a, "Hey, Ianto. Staying for tea?"
"Course he is," Rhi says.
Ianto gulps down the last of his tea and sets the cup down. "I don't want to impose, if I—"
"Don't be an idiot," Rhi breaks in.
"Course you're staying." Johnny grins. "You know you're always welcome."
Ianto settles back into the corner of the couch and slumps down in it, and a wave of warm, comfortable exhaustion washes over him.
XIV.
He didn't intend to stay over again originally, but he ends up helping David with his homework after supper while Rhi does the laundry when Johnny gets called in to cover a last-minute work order.
He's pretty sure Rhi keeps him busy on purpose after, asking him to help with the dishes and putting away the leftovers while she gives Mica a bath and puts the kids to bed, and then she asks him to make some tea while she sets the laundry to wash, and then she guilts him into drinking some tea while she puts Strictly on the TV and bustles around, obviously catching up on some of the things she put off so she could sit on a couch with him all day long.
He can't exactly say no when she asks after she's let him do an impression of a lump in her living room for twenty-four straight hours.
Then it's half past ten, somehow, and Johnny's back, and at some point when Ianto gets up to put his mug in the sink Johnny clears the couch of cushions and yanks the pull-out free again, and Rhi comes out of the tiny laundry room with a freshly-dried set of sheets, and Ianto tries to say he should head out, but she just goes, "Oh, hush," and tells him to help her with the fitted sheet.
She washed the spare pajamas, too, and hustles him off to change with a toothbrush Johnny picked up from the pound store on his way back from work, apparently. When he makes it out of the bathroom, his PEP pills, which he had in his pocket last night, are sitting on the coffee table next to a glass of water, and Johnny's just heading upstairs.
"We mean it, you know," Johnny says with a grin that's just this side of too casual. "You're welcome any time, mate."
He's off upstairs before Ianto can flush, and it's just a couple minutes before Ianto hears the shower turn on.
"Get some sleep," Rhiannon says, leaning up to peck him on the cheek when she heads up. "You can sleep in tomorrow again, if you want to skive off."
XV.
He flings his arm out when he wakes up, a flail that would have Jack talking about remedial lessons if they were on the practice mat in the training room at the Hub. Uncoordinated as it is, it makes solid contact—with not a little force behind it—and sends the glass of water flying off the coffee table.
It lands on the carpet, at least, so it breaks into a few pieces rather than shatter on the linoleum, but it makes enough noise it knocks him wide awake.
He curses and sits up, looking around for where he left his shoes.
"Ianto?" The stairway light flicks on, and Rhi's careful steps follow her voice on her way down.
"Shit," he mutters. "Sorry, I'm fine, it's fine. Knocked my glass off the table. D'you know where my shoes are?"
Rhi switches on the living room light and squints at him for a second while her eyes adjust.
"Under the table," she says. "I'll grab them for you, don't cut yourself."
She's in canvas sneakers for some reason, though she's clearly just out of bed, hair wild and pajamas rumpled. He doesn't try to puzzle it out, but jams his feet into his shoes as soon as she hands them over.
"Get back to bed," he tells her. "I'll clean this up, didn't mean to wake you."
She shrugs. "It'll go faster with two, don't fuss."
They go over the carpet carefully to make sure they haven't missed any pieces. Rhi says she'll hoover in the morning, but she doesn't want the kids to step on anything if they come down for some water before she's up.
"David's at the stage he doesn't wake us when he has a nightmare," she says, and if it's meant as a pointed hint it doesn't sound like it, but Ianto shifts at it enough it grabs her attention. Her mouth softens.
"Sorry I woke you," he starts. He scrunches up the top of the paper bag they've put the glass in. It crinkles in his grip. "I'm keeping you up again, and you're—"
"Hush, bach," she says again, like she did last night. "You're my little brother. You're not supposed to get hurt, but if you do I don't want you to feel like you're a bother. Ever. You understand?"
He nods.
"Good." She takes the bag from him and stands, using his shoulder to lever herself up and giving him a gentle push back towards the bed when he follows. "Now get some sleep, unless you want to have some tea and company?"
She lets it alone when he flops back towards the bed with a, "I'm fine, fine," kicking off his shoes as soon as he's on it.
She sets the bag on the lid of the trash bin and plods back upstairs with another, "Good night," taking the lights off with her.
He shuts his eyes, obediently, and takes a long, deep breath and tells himself to sleep.
XVI.
His eyes burst open again a half minute later, the phantom sensation of hands on his neck prodding him awake before he's properly asleep.
Bollocks.
It's a little past two, from what he can see of the kitchen clock from the light of the streetlamps that filters in through the cracks in the blinds on the windows.
Four hours before he needs to wake up, if he wants to go to work tomorrow. He's not sure if he does.
He stares into the dark and drums his thumbs on the edge of the topmost quilt, counting in his breaths. His sister's living room ceiling, unfortunately, doesn't hold any answers for him, even bathed in mysterious shadows as it is, this time of night.
Christ, he just needs to sleep. He just needs—
Hell, he doesn't know. There's probably something out there that can help him, something that'll make him feel better long enough to get some rest, but fuck if he knows what it is.
He'd thought he could push through it like he did after Brynblaidd, that it would be something like the same thing, maybe; because that was awful and this is awful, and it's all trauma, like the therapists Owen mentioned would call it. It was so close to the same thing, both times; someone taking him prisoner and him being scared for his life; just ten, fifteen minutes different, really, and it makes no sense that ten or fifteen minutes should make that much of a difference, not when it hadn't even hurt him as much as the beating in Brynblaidd.
It's just so stupid.
He swipes his palm across his eyes and feels atop the coffee table for the pile of napkins that they didn't clean up after takeout on the couch, grabs the first one he can find and blows his nose.
There's a noise upstairs, a creaking bed and footsteps and, a little later, a toilet flushing and water gurgling its way up the pipes to the sink.
It's fine, he thinks, and he catches his breath in the quiet that follows and feels his heart slow its rabbit thump in his chest.
The footsteps in the upstairs bathroom pad back to a bedroom and shut the door, and soon enough the house is asleep again above him, and Ianto's alone.
And, okay, he thinks, when he looks at the shadows on the ceiling again and feels them start to grow. Okay.
XVII.
He reaches over to the coffee table again, and slides his hand across it until his fingers bump into his phone. It's charging there, has been since he brought it in while Rhi was cooking, volume all the way turned down.
He opens it up and x-es out of all the new message and missed call alerts that pop up when the screen turns on. He navigates to his contacts page instead, and scrolls down to Jack's name, and clicks on it and brings the phone up to his ear.
"Ianto?" Jack asks after just one ring.
Ianto lets out a breath, and he tucks his free hand under the covers where it's warm and pulls them up to his neck.
"Hey," he says, and he sinks down into the thin, squeaky mattress and lets his eyelids flutter shut in a long and tired blink.
